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Thats funny because I thought it was shift-enter that creates a newline in a field where an enter submits. Just shows the fractured nature of this whole thing.

I've found Shift+Enter to do this pretty reliably across systems whatever they've chosen Enter / Ctrl+Enter to do.

It even works inside bullet points to add separate lines as part of the same bullet.


This is my thinking. Ctrl-Enter is usually "submit the form this input is a part of" in my experience, especially if you're in a multilinear text input (or textarea).

I've seen Enter, Shift-Enter, Ctrl-Enter, and Alt-Enter, (and on macOS, Cmd-Enter and Option-Enter), depending on the application. Total circus. I think this is actually a weakness of the standard keyboard: Keyboards should at the very least separate "submit form / enter" from "newline / carriage return" with different physical keys, but good luck changing that one, given the strong legacy of combining these functions.

While what you say is often true, it is a different problem and does not change the fact of the prior posters.


It's called Tragedy of the Commons, and it is just how things are unfortunately. I don't like it either, but if it wasn't this guy it would be someone else.


Well, it wouldn't be me, and it wouldn't be a lot of other people, so maybe it's not "just how it is", maybe some people are more willing to abuse the commons than others and we should be quicker to identify and condemn antisocial behavior instead of just shrugging and saying "Oh well, it's society's fault for failing to plug every possible profit motive for bad behavior"


It makes me wonder if this is B-roll footage for a news piece.


From the first graph, "The footage was captured by a CBS news team"


Indeed.


> The subscription services have assumptions baked in about the usage patterns; they're oversubscribed and subsidized.

Selling dollars for $.50 does that. It sounds like they have a business model issue to me.


This is how every cloud service and every internet provider works. If you want to get really edgy you could also say it's how modern banking works.

Without knowing the numbers it's hard to tell if the business model for these AI providers actually works, and I suspect it probably doesn't at the moment, but selling an oversubscribed product with baked in usage assumptions is a functional business model in a lot of spaces (for varying definitions of functional, I suppose). I'm surprised this is so surprising to people.


Don't forget gyms and other physical-space subscriptions. It's right up there with razor-and-blades for bog standard business models. Imagine if you got a gym membership and then were surprised when they cancelled your account for reselling gym access to your friends.


If they rely on this to be competitive, I have serious doubts they will survive much longer.

There are already many serious concerns about sharing code and information with 3rd parties, and those Chinese open models are dangerously close to destroying their entire value proposition.


The Business model is Uber. It doesn't work unless you corner the market and provide a distinct value replacement.

The problem is, there's not a clear every-man value like Uber has. The stories I see of people finding value are sparse and seem from the POV of either technosexuals or already strong developer whales leveraging the bootstrapy power .

If AI was seriously providing value, orgs like Microsoft wouldn't be pushing out versions of windows that can't restart.

It clearly is a niche product unlike Uber, but it's definitely being invested in like it is universal product.


> selling an oversubscribed product with baked in usage assumptions is a functional business model in a lot of spaces

Being a common business model and it being functional are two different things. I agree they are prevalent, but they are actively user hostile in nature. You are essentially saying that if people use your product at the advertised limit, then you will punish them. I get why the business does it, but it is an adversarial business model.


>Without knowing the numbers it's hard to tell if the business model for these AI providers actually works

It'll be interesting to see what OpenAI and Anthropic will tell us about this when they go public (seems likely late this year--along with SpaceX, possibly)


> Selling dollars for $.50 does that. It sounds like they have a business model issue to me.

its not. The idea is that majority subscribers don't hit limit, so they sell them dollar for 2. But there is minority which hit limit, and they effectively selling them dollar for 50c, but aggregated numbers could be positive.


When you said this, lemming's all jumping off a cliff came to mind...


I've never been as scared in a car as I was in an Uber in Chicago going to the airport. That man drove around cars like we were bleeding out in his car and had to get to the hospital or someone was going to die.


I bet his review distribution is highly bimodal.


I think I had this same driver.


I love this. Thank you for introducing me to "Norman Doors". I hadn't realized someone else had described this in such detail. I have been complaining about this years.

Ok this will be a tangent, but I also take this one step farther and also talk about "documentation". Just for the record, I don't think documentation is all good or all bad, but it definitely can be used incorrectly and in excess. And Norman Doors and a great way to get this point across.

When someone creates or installs a Norman Door by accident or out of ignorance and then realizes there is a problem, they often think "I know, I will document it!" and they add little placards to the door that says "Push/Pull" or some such. They see that this helps with a small subset of users and thinks "there, I fixed the problem, people just need to read the documentation and now it is their problem if they don't". But if you watch users of the door, a large portion will still use the door incorrectly because... people don't read documentation. If they don't read documentation, is it the users fault the door was designed incorrectly or was it the designers problem?

I use this as an example for my developers on thinking before documenting troublesome code or a confusing interface to first ask "can I design this so it is less confusing?" and if so, that would usually be preferable to adding documentation "to solve the problem". Well designed code (or doors) with no documentation always beats poor designs with documentation.


There's a funny example of even the "documentation" going wrong. At a local mall, there is a set of doors and they have put the word "PULL" (vertically like:

P

U

L

L

) on the window of the door, so from the wrong/opposite side, you still see the word "PULL" when you should PUSH (even if most of the letters are backward) so you still are tempted to take the wrong action when you see it. (I tried to explain the ridiculousness of it to the person I was with, but I don't think they cared.)


I've long suspected that I have a particular form of...dyslexia?, because I suffer from that Pull/Push thing, but also freeze when confronted with elevator door buttons that look like this: <>/><, and with public bathroom entrances, because in Spanish it's usually H/M (hombres/mujeres), but in English it's M/F (male/female), so the presence of the M throws me for a loop. My read on this is that if I see both options at the same time, my brain stutters for a second.


> but also freeze when confronted with elevator door buttons that look like this: <>/><

Same here! It's especially difficult when you're trying to quickly figure out the button to help someone who is about to miss the elevator.


Which reminds me of another "there, problem solved!" pet peeve of mine. I call it the Default Trap.

In many cases (Norman Doors are an example), there are two or more equally valid ways to do something. By "equally valid", I mean there is no clear standard for whether it should operate one way or the other, and if you ask 100 people which way it should work (which no one ever does), you get something approaching 50%.

So the product manager or perhaps developer simply says "make it a setting", and everyone agrees and declares the problem solved.

But the problem is, you have to choose a default. And 90% of the time, no one is going to change that default, or even discover how to. So you have to be very correct about assuming which value is the best default - and at that point, it probably doesn't matter that you make it an option.


The alternative I've seen to this is to ask the user which way they want it during the setup process. Light vs Dark mode is an example of this. The net result of this user choice is a longer, more complex, and burdensome onboarding process that is rife with decision fatigue. Once the user has chosen, if they don't like their choice, they may not know how to change it, since that initial action was outside of any standard interface.

The other issue with settings for everything is that the settings become bloated. In OS X, and to some extent iOS, I knew where all the settings were for the most part. Browsing them all to see what was available was a consumable thing, and I could largely remember where to go without much trouble. As macOS and iOS have added more settings to try and please everyone, and now redesigned the Settings apps... I've given up. I have no idea where most things are, what is in there, and have to search for everything and hope I use the right words.

There is an old video of Steve Jobs[0] talking about how every product is a series of decisions and trade offs. People pay companies to make all these decisions, and ideally, there is a company that makes decisions to similar enough sensibilities as yourself so that you can buy a product and use it without much fuss. It seems more and more that these decisions are all being pushed to the consumer, which in some ways makes a worse product. If I wanted infinite chose at the expense of complexity, I'd be running Gentoo or Arch. People choose macOS because it's supposed to be easy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmRNIGqzuRI


The point is that the 'maximum motivation level' for an employee is an inherent trait. It is a ceiling. Some people have high ceilings and some don't. If an employee has a low ceiling, no manager can motivate that employee higher.

But if someone has a high ceiling, the most a manager can do is create an environment that allows the employee to achieve their max potential. A bad manager on the other hand, can very easily bring a normally high-potential motivated employee down to mediocre levels.

If you are one of those self-aware leaders that knows how to create an environment where people can excel, then hiring highly motivated people is the winning strategy.


> In software I've heard "opinionated" about programs that limit configurability in favor of one fits all default

While this is one form of opinionated, it really just means that they are doing their own thing different from the other established players. This could mean MORE configurability in some cases. Another poster also said it, but opinionated just means that they have taken a stand in product design (features, looks, usability, etc) that they think it correct and it does not bow to 'the herd'. IMO, an opinionated design is neither good nor bad, but it is respected by me.


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